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On an individual level, it's as you say: it largely depends on whether you think life is on the balance more good than bad, or vice versa; or if you think life in the future will be better or worse. I'm agnostic on this point. What I would focus on, pragmatically, is what do the animals known as Homo sapiens sapiens actually do. Practically speaking, there's no way to get 100% of all humans to just voluntarily accept to never reproduce or commit suicide. Like all other animals, some number of humans will reproduce, even if many do not. Morally one should focus on what happens to those humans that do get born - ergo, what we should all make efforts to do, what we should all strive for, is to ensure that the humans that are going to come into existence, no matter our personal feelings on reproducing ourselves, will face a better world than the one that we faced in the past. The moral thing is not to pass judgment on those who do or do not reproduce the species, but to act in the best utilitarian interest of all the humans who are already destined to come into existence.
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Apr 3, 2021 20:18
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Another question to consider is: Is human life wrong? Or is life for all creatures worse than non-life? Why or why not? Should human beings specifically not exist, or is conscious life existing at all inherently worse just because conscious living beings can experience negative stimuli? You can easily take these arguments to the extent and conclude that life at all shouldn't exist.
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Apr 3, 2021 20:47
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So, let's consider the following: Prior to the existence of living beings that are capable of conscious experiences (and I'm defining "conscious experiences" very broadly here, literally any being that can react to feedbacks and possesses some kind of memory is a conscious being in this accounting), the universe operated solely by the laws of physics. Waves of water beat upon lifeless shores, the cosmic dance of stars and galaxies played out in accordance to the laws of gravity and motion. It was an unconscious universe, a universe that did not have objects of matter that could respond to stimuli. The universe was valueless and amoral, as there was nothing there to prefer anything. After the development of conscious beings, which behaved in certain ways in response to their environment, this state of affairs changed. Because of the circumstances of their evolution, living things could be said to "prefer" one state of affairs over another, insofar as taking physical action based on input stimuli, actions in accordance to some goal. So a bacterium could be said to "prefer" moving towards some food source rather than not to do so. A plant could be said to "prefer" sunlight. A beaver could be said to prefer a river with a dam made of logs than one without. All of these beings possessed the ability to take actions to enact a state of affairs more in accordance to their preference than not. And so one could say that the existence of consciousness brought into being in the universe a concept of "preferable" versus "not preferable", insofar as there being "states of affairs which conscious beings take action to enact and avoid". Therewith came "good" and "ill". There was no objective good or ill prior to the existence of conscious beings, because collections of solid matter that drift with the laws of physics cannot positively enact a different state affairs than simply being. Given this perspective, which is my perspective, anything which instantiates a state of affairs that more conscious beings prefer would create more good for those beings. And the creation of more conscious beings -- and I'm still using the very broad definition that encompasses all life -- and the creation of conscious beings that are more conscious and more capable would bring into existence more entities that could act to create preferable states of affairs for themselves. The more things that exist that can feel and act, then the more those beings can act to transform the material of the universe into a state of affairs that is more preferable to them. Thus, the goal of life, in my view, should be to propagate itself, and the goal of those conscious beings that are capable of contemplating their own existence, and the good of other conscious beings -- namely us -- should be to further propagate environments that are conducive to the evolution of conscious beings. Whatever you personally decide to do about having children of your own, it is morally imperative to contribute, in some way, to whatever ability you have, to the fostering of consciousness and the existence of life in the universe, as doing so maximizes the possibility of conscious beings coming into existence and having conscious experiences. The alternative is to accept a universe that is pre-conscious, a universe of atoms jostling against each other insensibly. That would be a universe where no more good could be created, because there would be no more conscious beings to prefer anything. That's not an acceptable outcome, because, having already come into being, the ultimate moral good would be to reproduce and foster conditions that increase it for all.
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Apr 4, 2021 01:33
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OwlFancier posted:Barring some quibbles about the deterministic nature of the universe I agree with the most of the first four paragraphs but there is a bit of a jump between that and "therefore we need more of this" Let me explain the logic there, then. 1) "Prior to the existence of conscious beings, the universe had no good or ill". 2) "Conscious beings act as if some states of affairs are more preferable to other states of affairs". 3) "The evolution of conscious beings caused there to exist in the world subjective experiences which, to them, are either more preferable or less preferable". 4) "The more conscious beings there are, the more things exist which can have experiences." 5) "Some of those experiences will be positive, and those beings will act to maximize those experiences." 6) "We should act to maximize total positive experiences experienced by conscious beings". 7) "Therefore we should act to maximize the possible number of conscious beings". quote:especially the idea that conscious life can, in the face of the complexity of the universe, actually make the world more preferable to itself on a macro scale. A disagreement over how practically feasible a goal is is a different point than a disagreement over what something is in abstract. As soon as an ant places a grain of sand that was lying at point x on its hill at point y, it has made the universe more preferable to itself. Aggregated over all conscious beings, any universe that has the capability of supporting more conscious beings is preferable to one that isn't, no matter how small the contribution. quote:Also as good and bad are purely fictions in our minds it seems weird to ascribe any sort of cosmic importance to it. Sounds a bit woo woo to me. Applying them to other fictions of our minds seems fine but further than that seems weird. They are not. Subjective experiences exist, because they are manifestations of the arrangements of matter that form conscious beings. "Good and bad" insofar as they are defined as "states of affairs that are more or less preferable to conscious beings" exist objectively as long as there are living things to act as though they prefer or avoid them. EDIT: The definition of "good and bad", however, is something that is subjective, and can vary depending on perspective. A "good and bad" that is the same for all beings does not exist. "Good and bad" at all exists. It is perhaps better to say that goods and bads exist. DrSunshine fucked around with this message at 02:00 on Apr 4, 2021 |
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Apr 4, 2021 01:53
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adoration for none posted:I think you're running into the repugnant conclusion here. Well, we can't quantify it. Those million people with 10 HU might have no reference or context to compare with the thousand people with 1,000 HU. To the people with 10 HU each, their whole existence might be better, because to them the whole difference in the world matters between 10 HU and 0 HU. You could flip this argument around the same way and apply it to any kind of social welfare. Would you prefer 1000 rich people get the best healthcare in the world (like in the USA), or a million people get decent, universal healthcare? My point is that you can't really quantify what "happiness" is. The best reference point is in simply "numbers of conscious life forms", and leave them the maximal opportunity to act upon their values by ensuring equitable outcome. This is also different from the "libertarian" argument where if you leave it all to the free market, everyone will rationally get their utility through free exchange.  This is what maximizing optimal outcomes means, and my argument is that it should be applied across the space of all existing and possibly existing conscious life forms. DrSunshine fucked around with this message at 17:12 on Apr 4, 2021 |
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Apr 4, 2021 17:07
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OwlFancier posted:You could not because you are not proposing creating more people in order to give them passable healthcare. That question deals with distribution, not the size of the possible pool to distribute to. What's to stop us from creating more people and giving them all excellent healthcare? Like, your argument somehow boils down to "we can maximize good outcomes by eliminating all conscious life, because consciousness necessarily entails the capability of experiencing negative outcomes". But that's just denying the entire argument. Reducing all possible utility to zero is not the same as maximizing utility.
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Apr 4, 2021 17:18
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OwlFancier posted:I don't think there is any extra value in a hundred happy, existing people than in five happy, existing people, as long as in neither case there are any unhappy existing people. Why? EDIT: quote:That assumes there is some special value in life existing, which again I do not think there is. Once life does exist I would prefer it to exist in a manner it is happy with, but there is no obligation to make it exist. That is just something you believe apparently axiomatically. No. All I believe is that something is greater than nothing. That N is greater than 0. Since life values existence, more life existing would create more value. DrSunshine fucked around with this message at 17:32 on Apr 4, 2021 |
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Apr 4, 2021 17:29
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OwlFancier posted:Life only values existence if it exists if it doesn't exist then it doesn't care because there isn't anything to care. That doesn't disagree with me at all. Of course this is tautologically true. But life does exist, and most living things do care about continuing to exist, and care very much about propagating themselves and avoiding pain. Even if all we care about is "allowing life in the universe to continue to exist", by its very nature, we are compelled by the self-replicating nature of life to accept that its number will continue to increase over time. And if we care about "allowing life in the universe to continue to exist" then we are compelled to act to sustain it as long as possible. I think you're misunderstanding me. You seem to think that I think that there's some kind of objective "elsewhere-thing" that values life existing above it not existing (like God or something). I do not. DrSunshine fucked around with this message at 17:49 on Apr 4, 2021 |
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Apr 4, 2021 17:46
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What about animals? Does animal life have value? Is it right or wrong to try to save species from extinction? Should we let the elephants go extinct because they can grieve like humans can? EDIT: How does any of this explain altruistic behavior in nonhuman animals? Is it wrong for humpback whales to save even other animals not their own species from killer whales? DrSunshine fucked around with this message at 01:15 on Apr 9, 2021 |
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Apr 9, 2021 01:10
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OwlFancier posted:And again as I have repeatedly pointed out, I don't think there is much historical evidence to suggest that just killing lots of people actually diminishes population growth in the long run, but education, access to contraception, and changes in social attitudes regarding the importance of procreation absolutely do. And are also just good things in general. You keep waxing between either a categorical "X is wrong" position and "X is impractical and unsupported by evidence" position. Which one is it? My question is "Is it categorically wrong to pursue the action of preventing species to go extinct?" not "Is it practical". Is it moral in the abstract to let species continue to propagate themselves? OwlFancier posted:I already answered that as well, it seems weird to me to imagine that animals are necessary happy (insofar as they are capable of experiencing happiness) given that nature is often very unpleasant to live in. I never said anything about imagining animals are necessarily happy or not. I asked whether their lives are inherently valuable.
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Apr 9, 2021 01:37
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Beelzebufo posted:His argument is that no human life is worth living. My hypothetical of letting a pregnant woman die is an exact replication of the scenario he has set up for himself, not creating new life and lessening suffering, but removing his excuse for not commiting suicide, which his own biologically programmed drive to live (that he says is a flaw that is hard to overcome). If he really believes what he believes, he should feel that he is sparing that woman and her child of suffering, so he should be comfortable saying that he would let her die. If he isn't, he needs to tell me how he reconciles that with his own stated premises. Actually, if you extend your hypothetical to possibly existing organisms, and assuming that the pregnant woman's offspring N has some probability P>0 of being able to procreate N+1 successors, it would mean that for every pregnant woman we allow to alive, we are allowing the possibility of coming into existence uncountable multitudes of future beings that could suffer, if we accept the premise of the nonexistence of non-negative hedonic values. Under this logic it's not merely sufficient to encourage humans not to have children, it's not merely sufficient to allow complex life to be extinguished in 1 billion years by CO2 depletion, only total cosmic extinction is the morally acceptable conclusion. Why? Because the remaining 1 billion years or so of life we have left on the planet is more than enough time to possibly give rise to another intelligent civilization, which might be able to colonize the universe even if we do not. In fact, even if this does not happen, there is still possibility that intelligent life could arise -- or has arisen --somewhere else in the observable universe. If we wish to eliminate this possibility (and therefore eliminate the possibility of untold vigintillions of sentient lives existing through the cosmos until the heat death of the universe), we conclude that we must invent some means of scouring the cosmos of all possible harbors for sentience. Perhaps that is the future. Perhaps some ultimate nihilistic moral actor will invent an ASI that will align its utility function to this person's coherent extrapolated volition and enact the doctrine of cosmic extinction? DrSunshine fucked around with this message at 16:26 on Apr 9, 2021 |
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Apr 9, 2021 16:22
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IronClaymore posted:Golden rule. I haven't. However, I have experienced moments of profound joy. Moments where I exalted in the fact of consciousness, moments where I felt like I could feel the electrons lighting up in their quantum well wherever the photons of the warm sun's effervescence lit up upon my skin. I've watched a storm roll in over the shore and laughed at the lightning as it exploded over my head, and felt profound awe and reverence as I walked through a silent vale of ancient bristlecone pines and felt their connection to deep time beyond the lifespan of civilizations as I touched their bark. I've looked up at the magnificent night sky and watched the twinkling trail of the milky way as it revolved above my head and felt, lying in the cold grass, like I could fly a million light years as I bathed in their light that had traveled for countless aeons untold through the darkness between the stars.
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Apr 9, 2021 21:06
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Life is incredibly precious and beautiful beyond all measure. It is the only example we know of of mute physics and chemistry creating order out of a soup of nothingness. Against all odds, it is a negentropic process that by pure chance appears to have spontaneously arisen only once in this cosmos - as far as we know. It is the only process that exists on Earth that does not merely dissipate, but also propagates. It is, as Darwin wrote, endless forms most beautiful. The fact that somehow, out of 4 billion years of life's existence on this planet, now there are life forms that can contemplate not only their own existence, but the well being of other life forms, and value the existence not only of their own progeny but every ant, microbe or blade of grass, is nothing short of miraculous. It may very well be the only chance that terrestrial life has of, possibly, surviving past the fiery death that is the Sun's middle age. I have been an environmentalist since I was a child, and I will never stop working towards a future where all of Earth's children can look up at a billion strange suns and wonder at the majesty of it all.
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Apr 9, 2021 21:27
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Origami Dali posted:otoh, you have this take Yeah, so? I didn't realize it was wrong to like things. Must not have gotten the memo.
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Apr 9, 2021 22:13
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Strawberry Pyramid posted:https://twitter.com/AP/status/1389800020409561089 "All peoples' lives, and all peoples' relationships with their parents, across all of history, are exactly as lovely as mine" -- A very normal and reasonable person.
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May 6, 2021 22:34
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Byzantine posted:I was also happy in 1996 This is a specious answer. Let's look at some data instead: https://ourworldindata.org/happiness-and-life-satisfaction
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May 6, 2021 23:36
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Vasukhani posted:I am content after eating a meal and no longer being hungry. Filling up and emptying a vessal makes me content to a level. This does not mean that the vessal not existing would be worse. When i hold my breath I feel relieve and satisifaction by breathing eventually. This is all just biological and has nothing to do with meaning. Yeah, the universe and everything in it is meaningless. Congratulations, it seems you've discovered the first part of 20th century existentialism! Time to read some Sartre!! The second part of this journey into modern philosophy follows, in which the existentialists answer: "So it is then up to people to define their own meaning."
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May 6, 2021 23:53
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Byzantine posted:Trying to puzzle out the rules of greater ethics and the meaning of meaning is overdoing it, imo, when the real crux is that the immediate future is loving bleak. Having a kid now just means they'll come of age right after the fifth once-in-a-century economic collapse and be stuck making $2.13/day in balmy Alaska. I think very few people in this thread would argue against that point. Is it probably a bad idea for you, the person posting in the forums right now, in the context that the average person on this forum is living, to have a kid? Yes, it's likely the case that they will experience a much diminished world and great strife. Is it logical to deduce from the likely context of the coming century of socioeconomic and ecological disruption, that it is categorically wrong for conscious life to exist at all, and that universal omnicide is morally correct? Almost certainly no. You can both believe that "reproduction, the phenomenon" is not inherently immoral, and choose not to personally have a child. You can believe that the human race is about to experience -- is currently experiencing -- a time of tremendous hardship, and also believe that a better world is possible. It's even possible to believe that the immediate present future that we, the living, is going to be one of terrible loss and filled with the passing of many wonderful things, but that the broader future can be made better in ways that we cannot even presently imagine, that the long-run future can even be inconceivably better than the present or near future -- if we fight and work hard to make it real. These aren't mutually contradictory thoughts at all. When someone who claims to be on the left claims that they don't think a better world is possible, I would console them to reflect on their professed beliefs to see if that claim doesn't remind them of the arguments of the liberals and reactionaries that they claim to be so vehemently against. DrSunshine fucked around with this message at 01:37 on May 7, 2021 |
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May 7, 2021 01:34
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Strawberry Pyramid posted:I mostly keep living not out of hope or zest for life, but as a gleeful act of defiance and spite against those who hate me. The knowledge that every breath I continue to take is a finger in their eye and a stream of warm piss in their cheerios is very personally satisfying. Who hates you? Why do they hate you? Why does it satisfy you?
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May 7, 2021 23:17
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Strawberry Pyramid posted:Because I was born. It satisfies me because they're terrible people who deserve to suffer as much as possible. That's all it really boils down to. I think it's out of the scope of this thread, but I would like to join the several other people here who are urging you to please seek professional help and spend a good chunk of time reflecting on these deep feelings of hatred inside of you, where they come from, why they exist, what compels you to stay so attached to such feelings of negativity, and what possible strategies you could take to cope and transform this profound energy into something more productive and personally fulfilling. People who confess to extreme negative feelings like yourself often embark on dangerous and destructive paths in life - both to themselves and possibly to others. See Seung-Hui Cho, Elliot Rodger and others.There's time to get off of this path if you take action. Best of luck to you, I genuinely hope for the best for you. 
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May 7, 2021 23:38
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Car Hater posted:That said, I also think that civilization is bad, and bad for us, and therefore that it is always immoral for civilized sentients to reproduce. Even the term, reproduction, captures the pitilessly machinistic lens through which civilization understands the world. What is "civilization"? Are hunter-gatherers not civilized? Are the seasonal settlements of slash-and-burn agriculturalists not civilized? Is the production of tools not a civilized behavior? The coastal areas of the Pacific Northwest were such abundant places, fed by the great upwelling of deep ocean nutrients surged up from the depths by the westerly flow of the wind, that they allowed gatherers to produce complex hierarchical societies despite not having agriculture. We have evidence for this in the massive shell-mounds that they left behind. Are they civilized or uncivilized?  This is a village in the highlands of New Guinea. People have been living in these areas for something like 40,000 years, cultivating taro and digging incredible stepped terraces in order to feed populations of thousands. They did this with Paleolithic technology. Are they civilized or uncivilized?  This was made by a person some 21-35,000 years ago. Is this not a product of a civilized human being, with the ability to imagine, plan, create tools and implements from nature, think abstractly, and render those abstract concepts into a representation in the world? My point here in asking these rhetorical questions is to say that there's no distinct boundary that makes up "civilization" and some mythical, imagined pre-agricultural existence. Archaeological evidence shows that hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists coexisted for hundreds, if not thousands of years. In fact, it seems that hunter-gathering and farming were mutual activities - people who lived in areas where agriculture was favored tended to settle into agricultural villages as part of a gradual tendency, starting with creating seasonal storehouses and progressing to permanent villages. They traded with their pastoralist and hunter-gatherer neighbors who lived in the more marginal areas where agriculture was unfavorable. We have been making tools, observing the world around us, making inferences, deliberately planning where to live and what to do with our environment for as long as we have been human - and even far before genus Homo even existed. Even pre-agricultural tribes intensely modified and altered natural landscapes to better suit their needs - isn't literal terraforming an act of civilization? To wish to hearken back to a pre-civilized era is to wish to eradicate that which makes us human, and to point at pre-industrial or pre-agricultural peoples as "better off because they are uncivilized" is to accept the same 19th century Imperialist framing that led to their decimation, and moreover to erase their essential humanity.
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May 15, 2021 21:05
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Strawberry Pyramid posted:back to the state we evolved to optimally exist This is blindly accepting primitivist rhetoric and "Noble Savage" myths at face-value. Evidence shows that we evolved and are continuing to evolve since the wide-spread adoption of agriculture. You can see another example in the evolution of lactose tolerance, which wouldn't have happened prior to settled agriculture. It's plainly unscientific to claim a state of "optimal evolution", because evolution is a constant process. DrSunshine fucked around with this message at 22:10 on May 15, 2021 |
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May 15, 2021 21:33
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NikkolasKing posted:What about the "fact" we care most about people close to us because we're just not designed to operate in a globalized world order where we are connected to people on the other side of the planet? We naturally care most for our family or community above all else because of evolution and that's how humans were for most of our existence? Well, obviously it's a work in progress! The physiological changes that made us able to thrive from eating grain and drinking milk are probably faster, and occurred earlier in our history, than the ones which are presently making our brains bad at caring about the wellbeing of humans we don't know about, or thinking and planning on a civilizational scale. But I would argue that this kind of evolution is happening and visible now. What is the rise of attitudes of despair and deep empathy applied across an entire civilization, especially among the young, like Greta Thunberg, but a form of natural selection bringing into existence a race of more caring, more selfless, more far-seeing humans? EDIT: And yeah, this: Beelzebufo posted:Humans do have the ability to abstractly reason other motivations for actions though (see nationalism/group identification), to the point of sacrificing their own lives/chances at passing on genes, so if anything humans show a strange pull away from what pure evolutionary pressure would seem to push towards. We can and do see humans being empathic towards others on scales undreamed about. ISIS was able to recruit people living nowhere near Syria or Iraq. Animal rights activists demonstrate that human beings are even able to feel empathy towards and display selfless behavior towards creatures that aren't even able to communicate with or understand us. If archaeological and anthropological studies are any indication, the high rate of mortality among hunter-gatherer societies is due to war with neighboring groups. If we reset the clock, we might end up finding out that a future nomadic forager society would be more violent than our current existence than less. All of the problems we currently see with nationalism and xenophobia, and strange cults forming due to information echo-chambers, would become magnified and shrunk down. Imagine if in your whole life, all your peers in your world are a single small neighborhood Facebook group, with no input from the outside world. Could you imagine what kind of echo-chamber your society would be if all you had to go on was the wisdom passed down by your grandparents? Suddenly rather than the "others" being some group of people living across the world, far away, the "others" are the tribe right next door. Rather than the adversary nation being separate from your nation by an ocean, the adversary nation would be the next hill over. DrSunshine fucked around with this message at 22:24 on May 15, 2021 |
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May 15, 2021 22:08
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Josef bugman posted:The ice sheets are melting mate. The idea that there is infinite growth available on a finite planet is not exactly a sustainable system now is it? Car Hater posted:Lol no, it's not agriculture that's the root problem, it's language. Language is the first and most terrible of all technologies, and what makes us human, and yes it should obviously be eradicated because it's not viable. Consciousness grants a degree of competitiveness that is incompatible with ecosystems perpetuating themselves. Humanity - the state of being self-elevated above a base animal - is a dead end biologically. Oh my god.  Why does every stance or argument on this site have to be framed in absolute, extreme binary opposites? Capitalism is insane, destructive, and oppressive, and we are living through a period of mass extinction at our own hands -- that doesn't mean we need to run the opposite way and declare consciousness itself to be the culprit and wish for something absurd, like the extinction of all mammalian life. Seriously. What the gently caress?? What is wrong with you people?? There's choices besides either "Rah rah number go up!!!" and "return to monke". Someone can deplore the broken capitalist systems that result in state violence against the 99% and the conversion of the world into a hothouse climate not seen since the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum --and not also gigabrain themselves into advocating for omnicide and a return to the sublime rule of rocks, photons and gas particles. quote:Consciousness grants a degree of competitiveness that is incompatible with ecosystems perpetuating themselves. Humanity - the state of being self-elevated above a base animal - is a dead end biologically. Do you think the ecosystem is some kind of perfectly balanced utopia where every species finds its perfect niche and coexists? Because I have an unfortunate bit of news - evolution is just a random mess, and whatever works or helps a species reproduce will be selected for. Sometimes this can have huge ecological consequences! For example, something happened about two billion years ago that granted certain species a degree of competitiveness that was incompatible with the ecosystem at the time perpetuating itself. That was the development of photosynthesis. This one adaptation gave certain types of cyanobacteria the ability to eat the CO2, which was just floating around, simply by sitting and absorbing sunlight! What an incredibly broken hack! Now cyanobacteria were able to run completely amok. They excreted Oxygen as a waste product, a chemical that was so incredibly reactive and oxidizing that it would rip electrons from any nearby atom, breaking up compounds and reducing them to unreactive dead oxides. This caused an extinction event so massive and so wide-spread that it left a layer of rust that we can see in the rock layers to this day. The random evolution of photosynthesis was a massive, profoundly disruptive event that caused one type of creature to tilt the balance of nature to such a degree that it caused a mass extinction. Was that a "bad" thing by nature of it disturbing the balance?
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May 16, 2021 15:17
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